Attorney General Bondi, as the decision to drop criminal bribery charges against Mayor Adams convulses the Department of Justice, has been conspicuously — even mysteriously — scarce. 

That posture stands in marked contrast to her assumption of the limelight in respect of, say, her tangle with New York and Attorney General James over immigration reform. Ms. Bondi’s distance from the brouhaha over the case against Mr. Adams comes as the presiding judge has summoned the parties to his courtroom.

That summons is to discuss “the reasons for the government’s motion to dismiss.” The parley is set for Wednesday at 2 p.m. Judge Dale Ho, whose background is on the left, notes that Mr. Adams has not yet consented in writing to the motion to dismiss. The government avers that he has done so.

The order to the acting United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, Danielle Sassoon, to dismiss the case came from the acting deputy attorney general, Emil Bove. A defense attorney for Mr. Trump in his hush money case at Manhattan,  Mr. Bove ultimately ended up signing the motion himself after seven senior prosecutors, including Ms. Sassoon, resigned in protests. She has predicted that Judge Ho will undertake a “searching” review of the DOJ’s decision to drop charges. 

Ms. Sassoon, in her letter informing the DOJ of her reluctance to author such a motion, contends that “No system of ordered liberty can allow the Government to use the carrot of dismissing charges, or the stick of threatening to bring them again, to induce an elected official to support its policy objectives.” Ms. Sassoon, a former law clerk for Justice Antonin Scalia, requested a meeting with Ms. Bondi. That has not happened. 

The lead prosecutor on the case, Hagan Scotten, a veteran of the Army Special Forces and a clerk for then-Judge Brett Kavanaugh and Chief Justice Roberts, wrote his own letter to Mr. Bove, telling the one time SDNY prosecutor that  “I expect you will eventually find someone who is enough of a fool, or enough of a coward, to file your motion. But it was never going to be me.”

Ms. Bondi has been mostly mum even as the L’affaire d’Adams has roiled the department she leads. When Ms. Bondi was asked last week about the status of Mr. Adams’s case, she told reporters that the “ case should be dropped. I did not know that it had not been dropped yet, but I will certainly look into that.” Mr. Bove, in contrast, has now written two memoranda ordering that the case be dropped. 

Mr. Bove wrote that the order to dismiss the charges against Mr. Adams was “authorized by the Attorney General without assessing the strength of the evidence or the legal theories on which the case is based.” In contrast, Ms. Bondi’s signature adorns the memorandum issued earlier this month of a “Weaponization Working Group” to investigate the prosecutions of Mr. Trump. 

It was Mr. Bove who conveyed the administration’s order that “there shall be no further targeting of Mayor Adams or additional investigative steps” and that the case  “improperly interfered with Mayor Adams’ campaign in the 2025 mayoral election.” On Monday, four deputy mayors to Mr. Adams resigned, and Ms. Hochul indicated that she may be ready to explore avenues to remove him from office. Mr. Adams on Tuesday compared criticism of his conduct to a “modern day Mein Kampf.”

Ms. Bondi’s reticence with respect to the prosecution of Mr. Adams casts into sharp relief her ownership of the federal lawsuit against New York for its Green Light Law, which allows illegal immigrants to secure drivers’ licenses and blocks the sharing of information from New York’s Department of Motor Vehicles with federal immigration authorities. The suit names Ms. Hochul, Ms. James, and the head of the Department of Motor Vehicles, Mark Schroeder. 

The attorney general has sued to enjoin that law, asserting that it violates the Constitution’s Supremacy Clause, which ordains in relevant part that federal law is the “supreme law of the land” and that it triumphs when it collides with state law.  “This is a new DOJ,”Ms. Bondi announced at a press conference. “New York has chosen to prioritize illegal aliens over American citizens. It stops. It stops today.”

Ms. Bondi explained that “we’re hoping that in New York, that Mayor Adams is going to cooperate with” the federal government with respect to “sanctuary cities and the illegal aliens.” At a meeting on Thursday between Mr. Adams and Mr. Trump’s “border czar,” Tom Homan, Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents gained access to Rikers. Mr. Homan told “Fox and Friends” that any suggestion of a quid pro quo, as Ms. Sassoon alleged, is “ridiculous.”  

Before leading Main Justice, Ms. Bondi served as the attorney general for Florida and as a defense lawyer for Mr. Trump during his first impeachment trial. The Department of Justice did not respond to a request for comment by the time this article went to print.